20
NOVEMBER 13, 1963
THE WHITE HOUSE
LATE EVENING
The man with nine days to live admires Greta Garbo as she takes off her shoes and lies down atop the mattress in the Lincoln Bedroom. There is a dinner party in Camelot tonight, and the famously reclusive Swedish actress is the guest of honor. Jackie Kennedy is self-admittedly “obsessed” with Garbo, in whom she sees a kindred spirit. But it is the president who has offered to take the fifty-eight-year-old beauty on a tour of what his schedulers simply call “the Mansion.”
At dinner, a nervous Garbo has knocked back glass after glass of vodka. But the president has been the picture of abstinence, neither smoking a cigar nor taking a sip of alcohol. “I felt like one of the damned when I lit a cigarette,” Garbo will later remember.
John F. Kennedy is enchanted by Garbo, as she is by him. Rather than sneak away from the party right after dinner to enjoy a few quiet moments alone before bed, as is often his habit, JFK lingers for “longer than I have ever done since I became President.”
Kennedy and Garbo have never met before tonight but have quickly become fast friends, thanks to a practical joke at the expense of Kennedy’s roommate from his teenage years at Choate prep school. Lem Billings is JFK’s best friend in the world. The two men are as close as brothers, and Billings spends the night at the White House so often that he keeps a set of clothes in a third-floor bedroom. In 1960 the forty-four-year-old advertising executive voluntarily took a sabbatical from his career to help Kennedy run for president, asking nothing in return. But JFK offered him a job anyway, as head of the brand-new Peace Corps. Billings declined, fearing it would alter their friendship.
Billings met Greta Garbo over the summer, while vacationing in the south of France. Upon his return home, the unmarried Billings boasted so frequently about how well he and Garbo had gotten along that even Jackie told him to stop talking about the movie star.
The president couldn’t resist. A friendly practical joke at Billings’s expense would only add to the thrill of Garbo’s visit. He called the actress, making her a proposition: “My friend Lem boasts how well he knows you. So when he comes in, pretend you’ve never met him before.” JFK persuaded Garbo to arrive early to the White House dinner party in order to rehearse her lines for Kennedy’s elaborate ruse.
“Early” in Camelot usually means sometime around 8:30 P.M. Tonight is no exception.
This is because the president has worked yet another typically exhausting day. His schedule began with a 9:45 A.M. meeting with columnist Ann Landers about the 1963 Christmas Seal campaign and ended with a 6:30 P.M. meeting with John A. Hannah, head of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. In between there was a meeting with the president of Czechoslovakia; a South Lawn pipe and drums performance by the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment), from Great Britain; a fifteen-person meeting about the poverty in eastern Kentucky; and a smaller foreign policy meeting with Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, and former secretary of state Christian Herter in the early evening.
The president took his usual midafternoon swim at 1:10 and had lunch at 1:40, but otherwise the pace never slackened. Meeting followed meeting, with Kennedy expected to be not just in attendance, but also knowledgeable about and decisive on each of the many varied subjects presented to him. All the while, in the back of the president’s mind, was the thought of next week’s trip to Texas.
When JFK hit the pool for his second swim of the day, it was 7:15. By the time he toweled off and went up to his bedroom, it was 8:03 P.M. Garbo had already arrived. Kennedy took his time showering and changing, knowing Jackie would explain to the actress that he’d been delayed.
Lem Billings was ecstatic when he saw Garbo. “Why, Greta! Oh, my gosh. How are you?” he exclaimed.
Garbo stared at him with a blank expression, then turned her gaze to Jackie. “You must be mistaken. I do not recall that we have ever met before,” she said.
When the president arrived, Garbo repeated her assertion that she didn’t know Billings. The president’s old friend grew more and more dismayed, ignoring JFK to remind Garbo over and over about where they’d met and some of the same people they knew. The more Billings talked, the more obvious it seemed that Greta had never met him before. Throughout it all, JFK unwound, setting aside the cares of the office as he reveled in the easy banter of this lighthearted dinner and his practical joke. Lem Billings will not realize he’s been had until tomorrow morning.
Soon after dinner ended, JFK took the entire group on a private tour of the White House. Now a tipsy Greta Garbo doesn’t want to soil the bedspread in the Lincoln Bedroom, so takes off her shoes before lying down atop the mattress. The tour ends in the Oval Office. Unbeknownst to most Americans, JFK has a habit of collecting scrimshaw and often bids anonymously for these pieces of inscribed whale’s teeth. They are on display in a case in his office. When Garbo admires the collection, the president opens the case and offers her a piece as a gift. The actress gladly accepts.
This is life in Camelot: a day spent solving the world’s problems, two therapeutic nude swims, celebrities at the table for a late-night dinner, and a tour of America’s most famous residence with a glamorous former movie star. Where else would such a thing happen?
But the evening ends abruptly. “I must go. I am getting intoxicated,” Garbo proclaims before disappearing back to her hotel.
Thus ends the last dinner party ever held in Camelot.
But the memory of this magical evening will linger, and even someone as famous as Greta Garbo is not immune to Camelot’s allure: “It was a most unusual evening that I spent with you in the White House,” she writes in her thank-you note to Jackie Kennedy. “It was really fascinating and enchanting. I might believe it was a dream if I did not have the president’s ‘tooth’ facing me.”
But Camelot is not a dream. It is reality—and that reality is about to take a turn that will alter America forever.
21
NOVEMBER 16, 1963
DALLAS, TEXAS
